(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump's staff will brief him Tuesday on a Democratic memo countering Republicans' claims of FBI and Justice Department bias in the Russia probe, his chief of staff said.
Trump has received the memo but hadn't yet read it in detail, John Kelly said before a meeting between the president and law enforcement officials at the White House. “I just gave it to him,” Kelly said. “It is pretty lengthy.”
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein met with Trump at the White House “to discuss differences between the two memos,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. Trump and some Republicans have criticized Rosenstein for his oversight of the Russia probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Trump, who signed off last week on disclosure of the Republican memo, now has five days to decide whether to approve release of the Democratic response.
“We are undergoing the exact process of the previous memo, in which it will go through a full and thorough legal and national security review. We're in the middle of that process,” Sanders said.
The House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously Monday that the Democrats' memo should be made public. The panel was required to submit both documents to the White House for review because they are based on classified information.
Republicans ‘Hammered'
Republicans were “hammered” in the Intelligence panel's closed-door meeting Monday for releasing their own memo last week while delaying action on the Democratic response, Representative Adam Schiff, the committee's top Democrat told reporters afterward.
"It's time for this majority to make the decision to be serious investigators," he said.
Separately, former White House strategist Steve Bannon skipped a closed-door interview with the committee on Tuesday despite being subpoenaed to appear. Lawmakers said the session was delayed a week for continued negotiations on the terms of his appearance.
Related story: Bannon Interview With House Panel Is Delayed
Schiff said Tuesday that “the White House continues to prohibit Mr. Bannon from testifying to the committee beyond a set of fourteen yes-or-no questions the White House had pre-approved.” He said “this is unacceptable, and the committee remains united on this matter.”
After Monday's Intelligence Committee vote on the Democratic memo, Trump must decide whether to release it, make redactions, or block it, a decision that's supposed to be made on national security grounds. On Monday, the president dismissed Schiff, the memo's lead author, in a tweet as “one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington.”
The FBI and Justice Department are already reviewing the Democratic memorandum for classified information, Schiff said.
The GOP memo, released last week with Trump's approval, charges that FBI and Justice Department officials conducting the Russia probe didn't tell a secret court that a dossier they cited to get a surveillance warrant on a low-level Trump adviser was paid for by Trump rival Hillary Clinton and Democrats.
Read more: Fact-Checking the Disputed Republican Memo on Russia Probe
Schiff, of California, and other Democrats said the GOP's goal was to undermine -- and perhaps end -- Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, whether anyone close to Trump colluded in it and whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice.
Schiff has said the secret court was “aware that there was a political motivation behind” the funding of the dossier produced by former British spy Christopher Steele. He has said the Democratic counter-memo is based on the same underlying classified material the Republicans used for their version but points out its errors and omissions.
Trump tweeted over the weekend that although the Republican memo “totally vindicates" him, the “Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on.” Even so, Republican members of the Intelligence Committee said on Sunday morning talk shows that Mueller's investigation should proceed without interference.
Unless the president notifies Congress by the end of five days that the Democratic memo's disclosure presents a threat to the national interest, the House committee could choose to release the information on its own.
Closed-Door Vote
Even if the White House refused to allow its release, the House committee could seek a rare closed-door vote of all House members to override the president and release it.
According to lawmakers who have read the Democratic memo, it's about 11 pages long and has annotations and explanatory notes.
The Senate's top Democrat, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, issued a statement calling on Trump to move quickly to release the memo and "allow the public to make their own judgment on the facts of the case." There should be "no question" that it can be released because it's based on the same underlying documents as the GOP memo, he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net, Jennifer Jacobs in Washington at jjacobs68@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Mike Dorning, Larry Liebert
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